Two commonly-used techniques for navigating to destinations of a computer network, such as the Internet, include: (a) manually entering a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) into a command line of a Web browser, and (b) clicking on a hyperlink displayed by a Web browser. Manually entering URLs having a long sequence of characters may be undesirable for some end users.
Various recently-proposed techniques for navigating to destinations of the Internet use bar codes to obviate manual entering of URLs. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,930,767, 5,938,726, 5,940,595, 5,969,324, 5,986,651, 5,995,105, 6,032,195 and 6,081,827, which are assigned to Motorola, Inc. and are hereby incorporated by reference into the present disclosure, disclose various approaches to computer network navigation using bar codes.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,978,773 to Hudetz et al. discloses that a bar code used to identify a product (e.g. a Universal Product Code) also may be used to access remote computers on a network. To access an Internet resource relating to a particular product, a user enters the product's UPC. A database retrieves the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) corresponding to the UPC. The URL is used to access the Internet resource.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,804,803 to Cragun et al. discloses a method which includes determining whether or not a code is a UPC. If the code is a UPC, URL information stored in a product database is requested using the UPC as an index. If the code is not a UPC, the code is considered as a URL string which may or may not be in an abbreviated form.
International Publication No. WO 00/16211 to Digitalconvergence.com, Inc. discloses a method for interfacing scanned product information with the manufacturer of the product over a global communication network. A product identifier is accessed at a source location on the network. Routing information is appended to the accessed product identifier. The routing information defines a remote location on the network. The product information is transmitted from the source location to the remote location in accordance with the appended routing information.